I was an admirer of JP II and his Encyclicals. Still, it seemed to me an odd thing to do. Not wrong, but odd. And I don’t think it has done anything to increase the saying of the Rosary, which probably was his purpose.
I must tell you I have long been amused by these added mysteries. The Rosary is a private devotion and as such is not binding on anyone at all in the first place. Secondly, as it is not a public liturgical rite anyone can do with it what they will, adding prayers and removing them, and changing the mysteries. Pope JPII decided, regardless of all of this, to promulgate his suggestions for new mysteries for those who chose to use them, obviously these being entirely optional. How do people react to a completely optional suggestion by a pope regarding a private unbinding devotion? They acted like it was a new tablet of Moses straight from the mountain top! They rushed out and changed every prayer book. Every Church which prayed the Rosary before or after Masses, or at other times, immediately changed theirs to include these new optional mysteries. I was even told on a pseudo-catholic forum, one which claims to offer Answers of a Catholic nature, that I was being "disobedient" to a pope when I said I didn't personally like them. How exactly do you disobey an optional suggested addition to a private devotion? Hmmmm.
But, what really made me laugh was how these same people who reacted this way to the optional suggested additions to private devotions then ignored everything the popes said that did impact public prayer or life in the Church. Did they pay any attention to the statements about abuse of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion? Nope, ignored it. How did they react to comments about Latin in the Mass, or music in the Mass or anything else in the Mass? Crickets, just crickets. Bring it up and you would get some vague thing about infallibility and ex cathedra statements. But those optional suggested additions to the private unbinding devotion? "The pope gave those to us, and we should listen to him!" Oh boy.
In a word, agreed.